


making yourself up as you go along

by monsterq



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Genderfluid Character, Genderfluid Loki (Marvel), Genderqueer Character, Growing Up, Internalized Sexism, Internalized Transphobia, Nonbinary Character, Pre-Thor (2011), Self-Discovery, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-03 11:33:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13340394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monsterq/pseuds/monsterq
Summary: Loki growing up and into their genderfluidity.





	making yourself up as you go along

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Against Me!'s "True Trans Soul Rebel."
> 
> Though Loki's experience is very different from mine, I am also genderfluid! And I love my genderfluid witch disaster child.

The dress is pale green, sleeveless, and made of silk, with a wispy gauze trim. It belongs to the daughter of a minor noble currently staying in the palace for a diplomatic event. She’s a little older than Loki, not yet showing breast buds but perhaps not far from it, and she’s almost a handsbreadth taller, so the dress doesn’t fit quite right. It tickles Loki’s bare feet where it should stop just above his ankles, and it hangs a little loosely on his torso, wrinkling oddly when he moves.  
  
He sits on his bed for a minute, feeling the texture of the silk on his skin and the way it falls almost weightlessly across his shoulders and lap, catching the edge between his toes and absently rubbing it back and forth. Then he stands, the fabric shifting and rustling with the movement, and takes a few steps forward, glancing one more time at the door to reassure himself that it’s shut. When he looks down and paces across the floor of his room, he can only see the garment and his legs and feet, which could be anyone’s. If he weren’t barefoot, he could be any fine lady walking through the gardens or across the banquet hall, or at least her daughter. He tries to mimic the way he’s seen the ladies walk—feet placed in front of each other, smaller steps, straight back. Hands not fidgeting with the fabric, but flat and relaxed at their sides.  
  
He looks up again and comes face to face with the mirror. The sight of himself is like a fist in his throat. There in the glass is his own face and body, a black-haired boy in an ill-fitting dress, skinny naked feet with a scab on the left big toe (a scuffle with Thor earlier that week) poking out underneath. He looks wrong, foolish. But when he squints, like looking at a half-formed illusion—or like seeing through one—there’s a girl in the mirror.  
  
Loki leans in closer. His double leans in as well, her eyes wide, one hand still loosely fisted in her skirt, the other coming up as if to touch her. Him.  
  
Of course, it’s at that moment that the door clicks open. “Loki, I—”  
  
There’s a second of absolute stillness. Loki has frozen in place, staring at the intruder in the mirror with one of his hands slightly raised, too late to turn or stop the door from opening. In the reflection of the doorway, Frigga has stopped, an expression on her face that Loki can’t quite read. Through the glass, their eyes meet and hold.  
  
The moment breaks. Frigga makes a decision, stepping inside and shutting the door behind her as Loki drops his hand and turns away from the mirror. He can’t quite face her, though.  
  
“I’m sorry, Loki,” Frigga says. “I should have knocked. My hands were full, but even so.” Indeed, in her arms is a collection of books, ones Loki requested last week for his studies of illusion casting. She sets them on the table beside the door.  
  
“It’s fine, Mother,” Loki mumbles, though in truth it’s not. This is a lot of things, but fine is not one of them. Shame is rising in his chest and his throat thick enough to choke on. He can feel his face burning. The dress feels like a brand wherever it brushes his skin, indecently soft, too loose on his skinny, knobby boy’s frame. Please let her stop looking at him. Why did he think he could try to be pretty?  
  
“Loki…” She pauses and seems to be choosing her words carefully. When he sneaks a glance at her, her eyes are unbearably kind. “You know it’s perfectly natural to explore, don’t you? There is nothing wrong with an interest in the feminine, no matter what some may say. And I love you, Loki, no matter what. I hope you know that.”  
  
Loki nods, his voice gone. He wishes to melt, to fall between the floorboards into the void of space, to be vaporized instantly. Why didn’t he learn a spell for invisibility? He’ll do that as soon she’s gone, if by some cruel misfortune his heart goes on beating.  
  
“But…” Again she pauses to choose her words. “Could you tell me where you got that dress?”  
  
The question catches him off guard, though he should have seen it coming. He’s not prepared. “Um…I found it. It seemed to have been discarded, and I only—“  
  
“Loki,” Frigga says again. There’s disappointment in her voice now, and Loki flinches. “Please don’t lie to me,” she says. “Did you steal it?”  
  
Of course she would guess. She always sees right through him. Loki’s mouth twists. He doesn’t look at her.  
  
She sighs. “We’ve talked about this, my child. It’s wrong to take things from others, especially when you have so much. If you need anything, you can always ask me, and I can get it for you. But you mustn’t steal.” She tries to meet his eyes; he avoids her gaze. “I mean it, Loki. If you want dresses or other such things, you only have to come to me. Do you understand?”  
  
“Yes, Mother,” says Loki. He will never, ever do that. Not in a thousand centuries. Even the thought makes his stomach clench up in a tight, hot ball of shame. He needs this to be over.  
  
“Very well.” She sighs. “I love you, Loki. Enjoy the books.” With a last, almost covert look at him, that unreadable expression on her face again—he can’t help glancing over, and their eyes meet for a fraction of a second that shocks through him like a bolt of lightning—she leaves, carefully shutting the door behind her.  
  
Loki takes off the dress. He doesn’t look in the mirror as he changes back into his tunic and leggings. The dress he folds up as small as he can make it. He’ll sneak over and return it when he gets the chance, he thinks.  
  
But he never does.  
  
He never takes Frigga up on her offer, either. And he promises himself he’ll never again take or wear girls’ things—it was a stupid, pointless, pathetic thing to do, he tells himself that night as he lies in bed, staring at the ceiling—but he doesn’t keep his word.  
  
Through the centuries, there is a chest at the back of his closet. He keeps a small but growing pile of things at the bottom of it, hidden and secret beneath old schoolbooks he outgrew long ago.  
  
*  
  
Men are strong. They are direct. Bold. They are warriors who solve their problems through force and valor, not trickery. So maybe this all makes sense.  
  
As an answer, that’s not exactly satisfying. It’s not that all men are the same, or that all women are. But there are ways men are supposed to be, and Loki tries and tries, he does, but he doesn’t fit. He doesn’t think he’d have any more success if he were a woman, not in the long run; he doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse.  
  
Loki is wrong, that’s all, all the way to the core. He’s always known that. He doesn’t lack for examples, or for teaching; he just can’t get it right. Next to Thor, who is everything he is meant to be, Loki is weak, cowardly, womanish, queer.  
  
He works and learns and fights with men, but he never feels like one of them, not really. Then he sits and talks and learns with women. But he’s not one of them either. He’s just Loki.  
  
Sometimes he’s glad of that. Sometimes he isn’t.  
  
*  
  
Loki can’t remember the first time he changed his shape. He’s told he did so a lot as a baby; his mother tells him stories of when he shifted in her arms to a bird or a serpent. It has always been part of him. But by the time he was walking and talking, he had stopped. It wasn’t until later in his childhood that he began to experiment with shape changing again—with control this time, with intention. He changed into animals, mimicked the forms of other Aesir, played games with the skill, learned its theory.  
  
His voice has cracked and deepened by the time he sits on the floor of his room, door magically bound shut, Loki leaning against it just in case. He doesn’t know why he’s so nervous. This shouldn’t be new. It shouldn’t be different.  
  
His hands are trembling.  
  
Loki closes his eyes. He reshapes himself, just a little bit, here and there. It feels like his whole existence itches, too tight, but as Loki eases into another shape, that feeling eases and turns into a strange, bright tingling.  
  
He flexes his hands. They feel the same, more or less. So do his feet as he wiggles his toes. He opens his eyes and looks down at himself.  
  
Herself. Like this, that’s allowed, right? It only makes sense. Loki doesn’t want to think about how the word slots into place inside her, into the place in her chest that feels wrong, all the edges fitting wrong, itching. Not always, but sometimes.  
  
Loki runs her hands carefully across her legs, then the opposite arms, then her torso, and finally her neck and her face. The changes are so subtle, but they, too, slot into place. They ease something inside of her, like a muscle held tight and cramped for years.  
  
With a twist of her hand, she summons a reflective surface in the air before her and pushes herself from the ground to stand, testing the doorknob absently as she rises. She doesn’t take her eyes from herself. It’s _her_ , the same as always, just little changes—her jaw narrowed, her hips widened, small breasts beneath her shirt, the place between her legs reconfigured. There’s less hair on her body and none on her face of what little has begun to grow, and her throat is smooth. She hums experimentally. The sound is clear and true. It’s not high, but neither is it low. There is a tangled pulse of feelings in her chest.  
  
Loki stays there for a long time, not doing much of anything, just existing in this body which is not hers and yet which is. Once, she changes back, slips back into her other form like flipping a switch, cataloging the differences. The itch she feels is different this time. Then she flips back again. The door stays closed.  
  
At dinner time, she pours herself back into her first body like water into a cup. She’s not ready, but she has to. She—he—damn it all, she—goes to dinner itching. Loki’s busy all the next week, barely a moment alone. She doesn’t feel right again for days. When the feeling leaves, it’s slowly, not all at once, until Loki’s shape fits him again like well-tailored clothes.  
  
*  
  
As a child, Loki spends a lot of time in the halls of healing, watching the women as they work. He doesn’t know why he is drawn there, but when he’s finished his lessons with his tutors and his mother, and when he isn’t playing or fighting with his brother, he finds himself wandering up there, to the injured and the healing, to the bitter smells and ever-changing sounds, to the work and the strange, powerful knowledge, the transformation of what is broken into what is whole. They put him to work too, his princely status irrelevant when there are battle wounds to be tended and fevers to be soothed. At first it’s only as an extra pair of hands, fetching bowls of water, holding washcloths, pouring medicine, steadying the wounded as the healing is worked. Then they let him mix medicines, then make them; as his magic grows, they even let him heal.  
  
As he grows, so do the comments. People question why a young boy spends so much time hanging about women at their work when he could be playing and learning with boys, with men, with warriors. Then they ask why he is doing the women’s work of healing. They laugh behind his back, and when they aren’t laughing, they’re watching. It isn’t right, they say. It isn’t natural. But then, they say, smirking knowingly, perhaps that is what should be expected when it comes to the second prince.  
  
By the time he’s grown, he has stopped spending much time in the halls of healing.  
  
*  
  
It takes Loki years to work up the nerve to go out in public in that other shape. Years of experimenting, imagining, planning; years of building identities down to the last dream; years of plotting out dozens of best and worst scenarios.  
  
The first time, she makes herself blond. Not just blond, but small nosed, brown eyed, short, curvy, even a little bit older. She changes her body until she can’t recognize herself, she dresses herself in a loose, flowing blue cloak, and she transports herself far away, to a tavern among strangers. There Loki sits, her heart battering at her ribs and her breaths slow and even, and nurses a drink as the world moves on around her. People look at her, but they’re curious, casual, or appreciative glances, not mockery or disbelief. Her nerves make her whole body feel alight, almost burning, but as she sits there something warm and tingling spreads inside her chest, and it’s not the alcohol.  
  
The next time, Loki keeps her black hair, most things about her face and body. She changes little enough that if a friend or family member saw her, they might even recognize her. This time, she goes even further from the palace and wanders a market among townsfolk. They don’t know her; they know the younger prince, but likely few of them have ever seen him close up, and they would have no reason to make the connection even if they had. She wears her cloak again, pulling the hood up to drape over her head as the afternoon wears into evening and the sky grows heavy with clouds.  
  
It’s years later that she finally allows those she knows to see her. Not in that form, of course, not with her own features. But one day, Loki dons the shape of an almost elfin girl with short red hair and a dusting of freckles and ventures out among them. She sits in the courtyard and watches acquaintances pass by, barely glancing at her; a distant friend approaches and strikes up a conversation, which she fields with all her wit and charm, leaving the man enamored and promising to find her here again.  
  
There’s something about the experience that is both deeply satisfying and deeply frustrating. It leaves her with an elusive longing tangled around her bones for days, each time she repeats it. And repeat it she does. Once, she even seeks out Thor.  
  
He’s in the practice yards with some friends; at the moment, they’re all engaged in different activities, so Loki sees an opening. She approaches, projecting poorly concealed awe and admiration coupled with the outgoing sense of fun and adventure Thor always appreciates, and introduces herself as a friend of a friend visiting from afar. Thor, of course, warms to her immediately. He smiles and flirts and shows off, fooling with his hammer with a cocky grin, and doesn’t recognize her at all. Loki doesn’t know what she’s trying to accomplish. Her brother is broad and golden and self-assured, glowing with sweat and effortless charisma and perfect, easy masculinity.  
  
She even manages to flirt him into sparring with her, and if he’s holding back, it’s still the rush and life of impact, breath coming in pants, a canvas of sweat and bruises. It’s fast calculations and the wordless, rhythmic communication of moving bodies. The architecture of his body and the pattern and power of his movements are so familiar; she’s done this with him many times in her usual form, and now it’s so different and yet the same. To her, he is still just Thor, but to Thor, she is a stranger and a woman. She doesn’t know which of those things is more significant, but Thor has never looked at her this way before, each nuance of expression and gesture altered. Perhaps she’s wrong; perhaps by changing her own shape she’s changed Thor’s as well, if only in this moment, in this space between them. The strangest part is that she feels no different.  
  
Once, Loki looks up from a meaningless chat with a collection of acquaintances and sees Frigga watching her. She didn’t know Frigga was in the courtyard; Loki’s been avoiding her, in fact, she now realizes. And now, meeting her mother’s calm blue eyes and feeling the gaze shock through her, she knows why. These others, these friends—friends of Thor, really—don’t know her. They have no idea that this clever, charming girl is their friend’s tagalong misfit of a little brother.  
  
But Frigga knows. Frigga has taken one look and can see right through her. Loki has no disguise; she is naked to her mother’s gaze. And Frigga sees her.  
  
Loki makes her excuses and leaves through the opposite door. From then on, she checks her mother’s plans before scheduling her excursions and stays as far away as possible. Frigga never brings it up (did she really see Loki at all?), and Loki is pathetically grateful.  
  
There are other times. Loki spends a long time in front of the mirror, shaping it. The body? His body? Hers? It feels different, and Loki does this differently. They work feature by feature, watching themself change in the glass until they are unrecognizable as Loki, yes, but also unrecognizable as man or woman. They go out like that, far from home, look at which people stare and which stutter over their form of address and which don’t react at all. More than that, they spend time with how they feel in their body. Or someone else’s body, perhaps—but what’s the difference? It should be impossible for so many bodies to feel right and yet wrong. They don’t know how to say it. Perhaps no body is really theirs. Or any of them is. Or they’re not meant for a body to begin with, which is why they are unanchored, unsatisfied, forever shifting. No body is Loki’s home. Is it that a body belongs to someone, or that someone belongs to a body? These are foolish thoughts. Thor would laugh to hear them. Loki tries not to think of Thor at times like this.  
  
And even later, they begin to play with changes yet smaller than these. Changes so small that no one would notice them if they did not know to look. Loki wears their own face, as much as they ever do, but alters it incrementally—the slightest narrowing of their jaw, the slightest changes to their brow, their nose, their throat—and then, too, beneath their layers of clothing, changes nobody can see, experimentations in ambiguity that Loki has never seen on a body. Do they exist, or is Loki only trying to shape their body to be as monstrous, as anomalous as they feel inside? Would it matter? Becoming this body is—it’s relief yet disgust. It’s feeling right in their skin yet wanting to crawl out of their own existence. It’s like going home after many years of wandering, except home is a war zone, the smell of death in the air and warnings slashed in charcoal on the walls.  
  
They shut away their thoughts and put on layers like battle armor to go among their people, their friends and family, though lately such terms feel sometimes alien. Loki goes out to meet them, heart pounding in the almost obscene perversion of a body they have constructed for it, walking among them like a mockery.  
  
No one stares with dawning realization, then revulsion, scorn, contempt. No one notices a thing. The most perverse thing of all is the way that Loki, beneath their shuddering relief alone later that night, is somehow disappointed.  
  
*  
  
In stories Loki reads growing up, sometimes men turn into women or women into men. Sometimes men put on women’s clothing, or vice versa; sometimes in other ways their roles are twisted. Sometimes these figures are outsiders, or clowns, or villains; sometimes they are heroes forced through comical trials. Their blurring of gender is amusing or disturbing, humiliating or sinister, degrading or disreputable, but what it never is is normal. What it never is is right.  
  
As a child, Loki reads these tales with a shameful hunger, unable to think about it directly yet unable to look away. Loki feels the bizarre urge to hide the reading of these stories, even knowing that that will only draw attention—attention to what is, after all, nothing. But Loki hides, and Loki reads, and Loki remembers.  
  
People have always called Loki strange. They’ve said it in a hundred ways, a hundred voices, a hundred responses to a hundred moments. It’s no surprise. All the things a man of Asgard should be, and Loki has never been a single one of them.  
  
So many times have people responded to Loki’s magic and trickery with smirks, whispers, taunts. Some have only disapproving frowns; others dole out well-intentioned advice. But it’s not as if Loki doesn’t know that these are women’s skills, not for men to cultivate. It’s just that Loki doesn’t care.  
  
Or tries not to care.  
  
All the things a woman of Asgard should be, and Loki has never been a single one of them, either.  
  
*  
  
When they are children, they play with false weapons, competing in strength and skill. Sometimes they engage in mock battle; Thor wins more often than not, at least if Loki is forbidden to use magic, which Thor says is cheating. This time, they’ve just finished such a bout and are slumped on the ground, breathing hard and nursing bruises as they begin to form, weapons tossed carelessly aside. Loki is quiet, trying to suppress the frustration and resentment that often rise from such contests. He sits leaning against the wall, legs stretched out in front of him, hands loose on the ground. His shoulder aches from a whack Thor delivered only a few minutes earlier, and he’s determined not to show it; two of Thor’s fingers, though, will be swelling from Loki’s own attack. Thor is an artless heap on the packed earth, grinning despite the bruises and the dirt on his clothes. “That was fun, wasn’t it, Loki?” he asks, rolling to face him.  
  
“Yes,” Loki answers, unsure if he’s being truthful but too tired to bother finding out. Despite the frustration coiling in his gut, these bouts are always exhilarating; he enjoys them while they last, at least. And there’s something contagious about Thor’s happiness. It’s always been that way with his brother, the way his feelings shine out from him and into everyone else; he can’t not draw attention, draw love, draw loyalty. So joy answers to joy, and pleasure to pleasure—though even this cannot be uncomplicated for Loki, as some hidden part of him draws tighter around itself, almost defensive, refusing to be overwhelmed and subsumed.  
  
Loki closes his eyes against the sun. He hears the sound of his brother’s laughter, then a shuffling as he shifts closer. Loki’s eyes fly open in surprise when he feels a weight settle on his thigh—Thor’s head, leaning affectionately against him as he smiles up into his face. Despite himself, Loki laughs too. He lifts a hand to brush stray strands of hair out of Thor’s face. There’s a streak of dirt across the bridge of his nose.  
  
Thor hums in satisfaction; his eyes close above his smile. “You did better than last time, Loki.  Though you still hesitate before you strike, and you don’t use your whole body. You think too much. The training master says you fight like a woman.”  
  
Thor’s voice is teasing. Loki’s body feels suddenly hot. “I do not.” Does he? Is that bad, if he does? He knows there are women who are fierce warriors; surely there is no real shame in that. But another part of him argues differently. “I _don’t_. I beat you all the time. I just need more practice; then I’ll be better than anyone. I’m not weak.” He’s suddenly hyperaware of the intonations of his voice, the slimness of his body next to Thor’s solid build. He pushes Thor’s head off his thighs and struggles to his feet. “Let’s have another round. Come on.”  
  
Thor rises up on his elbows, frowning. “I meant nothing by it, Loki. I was only joking. It was he who said it, besides.”  
  
But they fight again. Loki insists. It’s more intense, desperate even, at least on Loki’s side. He wins, and Thor claps him on the shoulder and assures him he’ll be a splendid warrior, that there’s no one he’d rather fight beside. Lying in bed that night, Loki wonders why he still feels wrong, small and peeled open like some bitter, poisonous fruit.  
  
Centuries later, they’re eating lunch in a copse of trees with Thor’s friends, out on what’s nominally a hunt but is really more like a walk (or even, for more the terminally cheerful among them, a frolic). Thor lounges against a craggy mass of roots like a throne while Loki perches on one of the branches up above. The others are chatting or bragging about their skills.  
  
Loki prefers to stay out of it, at least until one of Thor’s friends, a tall man with a full dark beard whom Thor hasn’t known for long, speaks up. He smirks up at Loki as he addresses Thor. “Your brother here is more inclined toward the womanly arts, it seems. Well, it’s not as if those don’t have their uses. But I suppose it’s lucky he has you to be the man, eh?”  
  
Loki is used to this by now, as he is to the laughter that follows. Thor looks a little uncertain about how he ought to react. “I don’t…” he begins.  
  
Loki cuts him off, letting his legs slip from the branch and laughing himself, his voice light and mocking. “No need, brother. Your companion’s insight is formidable. Useful though my more perverse traits may be, it’s a terrible shame I’m not more like you, isn’t it?” He cocks an eyebrow. “Certainly what Asgard needs is more muscle-bound sword-swingers who rush in without thought so that they may defeat their enemies by force of raw masculinity alone.”  Loki swings his legs together and drops lightly to the ground. He lets his weight rest on one leg as he regards them. “You know, just the other week, I won a bout against a brute with an axe through misdirection and a bit of illusion magic. You should have seen the look on his face. The utter bafflement. The outrage. ‘How dare you! You should be ashamed to call yourself a man!’ It was a true delight.”  
  
It’s beginning to grow dark beneath the trees. Loki conjures a brilliant, dancing green flame in the palm of his hand and smirks at the man. He allows a razor-edged sliver of flirtation to slip into the expression, enjoying the discomfort growing on his face. Loki’s supposed to be ashamed, to be pushing back against the accusation; this is all wrong, and both of them know it. “We ought to be heading back, I think. I do hope you’ll let me know if you have any need of my abilities.”  
  
Moments like these become more natural to Loki, easy, even satisfying, as they repeat themselves. He no longer feels that hot rush of shame and terror and fury at their words, or if he does, it’s buried deep enough that only the barest whispers of its flames reach his senses; he fills his mind with pleasure and amusement at the looks on their faces so there is no room for anything more. Even so, when he isn’t thinking about it, he still finds himself struggling to prove himself, to measure up. Loki hates that impulse in himself, hates it with a nauseating intensity. But what he hates more, if he’s honest with himself, which day by day seems less appealing, is that very difference in him that means those efforts will never succeed.  
  
But people don’t need to know that. If Loki can’t change it, when Loki can’t hide it, he will make it a weapon. And so he does. It works well enough. It always does.  
  
*  
  
When Loki changes, it’s not like they become someone else. It isn’t even like they become a different version of themself, not always. It’s like…sometimes different forms and words feel more comfortable to Loki, but they’re still _Loki_. And sometimes it doesn’t make any difference—either is fine, or both, or something else; they’re all as right as each other. Which is—right enough. Loki is both, and. Loki is neither. Loki is a thing that is always changing and yet always the same, like a flame in a hearth, a flame in a hand.  
  
Loki grows up and grows used to it, to this shifting, crooked aspect of themself that refuses to be pinned down; perhaps they even grow into it. They fit themself perfectly, at least sometimes, though they fit nothing else at all. (Or is it the other way around? Either way, they become intimately familiar with many of their edges, their seams. But never, it seems, all of them.)  
  
Loki has some time ago reached her majority by the day she walks into the throne room before a royal event in her own adjusted body. She’s wearing her helmet as well as her favorite formal clothing, just to be sure there is no mistake. As she strides up to the throne to assume her place beside it, Odin’s brow furrows; he recognizes her, evaluates her and the problems she has chosen this moment to cause, and then visibly dismisses the issue. Thor’s eyes widen and his lips part in confusion, and Loki can see the questions forming in his mind. He likely won’t even wait for the event to be over and the people to disperse before demanding answers of her in a loud whisper. Those very people are now beginning to file in; some eyes are falling on her, necks craning, mouths whispering. Her mother only cocks her head for a moment and smiles.  
  
Loki reaches her place and turns to face forward, ignoring them. Her hands are shaking, but she hides them behind her. Her back is straight, her chin up, her face conveying utter nonchalance. She does not intend to explain herself.

 


End file.
